Original Literary Works

Holidays

My friend Aliz called from Washington to say approaching weather may cause her to delay returning to Miami Beach after her absence of many moons. I was crestfallen yet bade her to bide her time until the time was right to travel. I wish she would just have her car trucked back and forth. She took me on I-95 a few times and scared the dickens out of me.

She said a beautiful friend of hers from Brazil will open a restaurant in South Beach soon, so she made sure I got on the invitation list. She remarked on how beautiful and “sophisticated” Latin American women can be, and attributed some of that to affordable plastic surgery.

I said that I had by coincidence been Google-imaging European Union women by nationality and discovered French women to be “sophisticated.” But that was not really the word for it, and I was at an unusual loss for words.

Many women I viewed from other countries, I noted, posed themselves in the most vulgar manner, whereas most of the French women were of erotic demeanor, that is, not so obscene.

Knowing Aliz’ sense of propriety, I did not dare say my aesthetic study was of nudes, because then she would have been offended and I would have had to waste time explaining that my interest was not prurient at all, that it was academic and conducted quite clinically.

She insisted Latinas are the most attractive women in the world. I responded that I would not know because my study was limited to ascertaining where in the EU erogenous beauty was cultivated the best. That would be France. I shall have to consult with Roget’s Thesaurus before providing a critical argument leading up to my foregone conclusion embedded in my premises.

Some people, as every man and woman knows, are naturally sexy, and they serve as models for others to imitate the best they can.

I recall the real estate professional who turned to teaching pole dancing during the big downturn. She taught the girls the moves. They followed her closely, and were doing what dancers call “doing technique instead of dancing.”

She certainly did not look like your average woman of sixty. She was an extraordinarily sexy when dancing. Otherwise she was modesty attractive, and looked half her age. Her students ranged from beginners to professionals who performed in clubs and gave privates. She could show them the moves and explain the mechanics, but she could not teach them to be sexy other than to talk metaphysically about the feelings she projected.

She knew I had been a dancer, so one day she asked me to spot her while she was trying a new move on the pole. After I helped ease her to the floor, I begged her to allow me to be her slave.

Well, Aliz said she longed to be back in Miami Beach for the winter, yet Washington was very beautiful during the Christmas holiday, making her glad she was raised a Christian. I remarked that anyone could enjoy Christmas in Washington: atheists, Jews, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Muslims….

“Oh, there are many Muslims here,” she said. “I see them everywhere because of the way the women dress, the scarves….”

“I was almost run over in a crosswalk by a Muslim woman wearing one of those scarves when she made a left turn. The edge of the scarf blocked her view.”

“Maybe that is why women were not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia,” Aliz said.

“They can now that the head prince is modernizing things.”

“They could make special scarves for driving,” Aliz suggested.

“I don’t think so. No texting or scarves should be allowed at all when driving a vehicle. It was a scarf that strangled Isadora Duncan when she was driving.”

“They could pull and tie the scarves back on their heads. I have a hundred scarves in storage,” Aliz said, naming several luxury brands. “I have a book about the many ways to tie a scarf.”

“I remember when many women in Chicago wore scarves, and some wore veils, I think on Sunday and when in mourning. I don’t blame women for wanting to be discreet when men act like dogs. Women put on a hard face, avert their eyes. Muslim women might even wear a sack until they get to the function they are going to on a camel or in a limo, and, when they arrive, they exhibit their legs with a short skirt and high heels. Some fine burkas cost thousands of dollars, you know.”

That led me to say I had a headscarf a woman gave me in Manhattan in 1968. I did not tell Aliz that she was a call girl. I did not mind her calling because I ran away from home when I turned thirteen, grew up on the streets of Chicago and New York, and I believed people who condemned prostitutes for renting out their bodies yet sold their souls for money were worse prostitutes, if that is the word people want to use. I would not, however, move into the penthouse she bought because being there when her tricks were around was not for me. She gave me her little brown scarf in parting, to keep my soprano recorder in. Aliz said I should wash it, but I cannot because it would fall apart if I did, as that is what happened with my old baseball cap.

Speaking of recorders, I recounted to Aliz my brief fling with a Manhattan actress who had men eating out of the palm of her hand wherever she went. She was definitely of star quality, indeed, already a rising star, having started out in B movies. She was waved to the head of lines wherever she went. She made no overt demands on men, yet she was well served by her court. Men actually came up and congratulated me for being her companion. She gave me an alto recorder on my parting, in 1972, which I also still have to this day. Richard Chase made a box for it when I arrived in Hawaii that year.

Aliz knew the special “feeling” I was talking about. I was nearly knocked dead some years ago when I was the privileged subject of one of her rare “flirts.” Yet that kind of romance was not in the works, and we are great friends. That kind of relationship is difficult to find in South Beach. I hope that the weather will permit her to drive down soon. I shall see if I can remember some songs to play on my recorders in the meantime. I used to be a good musician and dancer. I live almost entirely in my head now. I need a vacation.

I certainly understand why my next door neighbor, Tracey Flagler, may she rest in peace, opted out of her conditioned life in South Beach on Thanksgiving Day of 2007. I nearly did the same thing myself one New Year’s Day, so I have no right to blame her. Besides, what person in her right mind would want to live forever in the very world of circumstances that had made her so miserable? In any event, many reasons can be found for committing suicide.

Of course lunatics are not morally guilty of self-murder by reason of insanity. In their absence of mind they lose self-respect and the so-called instinct of self-preservation, and may therefore give effect to almost unimaginable scenes of self-mutilation and self-annihilation. Even an healthy individual might be momentarily seized by a heretofore repressed, fundamental anxiety, and suddenly be driven by a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach to her demise, throwing herself out of a window, for example, as a woman did during my lunch hour one day in Midtown Manhattan – fortunately the horizontal extent of her leap caused her to land on a taxi cab instead of the crowded sidewalk below.

Relatively sane people have many reasons to end it all. Notwithstanding the fact that thinkers have gone to great lengths to prove that suicide is irrational in itself, self-destruction may be a perfectly logical outcome of a person’s creed or rationale. Liberty is often cited as a sufficient reason to murder oneself if not countless others. People might kill themselves for some professed ideal, or to save the life of others, or perhaps to relieve caretakers of being a burden unto them. Suicidal libertarians might martyr themselves to demonstrate against and shame the authorities instead of assassinating them. Tyrants prize the lifestyles they have obtained at great cost to those who fear and envy them – indignant pride or wounded self-esteem has often provoked suicidal rebellion against one tyrant or another; although their suicide in itself gives tyrants little cause for remorse, perhaps the masses will take the cue and rise up against them. Greedy competitors in the war of all against all covet and hoard the things of this world at great cost to those who would rather make love than war – some people prefer not to set evil against evil, and kill themselves instead.

Abject poverty has always offered a civilized person a reason to embrace the ultimate poverty of death. Today’s religious individualism places the blame for poverty squarely on the I-god individual, who should prefer death to being cast on the street to be publicly shamed. Indeed, the rise of individualism in ancient Greece was accompanied by the increased discussion of suicide – discussions of the subject are believed to result in an increase suicide rate – not only due to social disorganization: if a man was his own best friend, he might rightfully put an end to a life that was not worth living as far as he was concerned.

Later on the Stoic schools condoned suicide, and even recommended it where immortality was disbelieved, for death was seen ever since the beginning of history as the cure for all ills. Unreasonable suicide was deprecated by reasonable men including Stoics, but many Stoics and Cynics who were indifferent to death as evil and life as good would not even scoff today at woman today who killed herself for breaking finger nail: the founder of Stoicism was said to have killed himself over a wrenched finger. A truly indifferent Stoic might do himself in even if he were happy; likewise an unhappy person might suffer indefinitely. Others simply saw suicide as a naked human right.

Homelessness is despised wherever money is God, and some people think God puts homeless persons on the street as a warning. Where money must be had to purchase love, not much can be said for love or for the value of money, and everybody suffers accordingly. And wherever expectations run high, disappointments are accordingly severe. In any event, there is no end to desire.

The bare necessities are never enough, and wants are multiplied with the supplies as advertised. Tracey Flagler, for example, had food, clothing, shelter and a bicycle, but that was not enough: she went to the movies, she watched television, she read magazines, and she served rich and famous people at the restaurant, observing them having a lot of fun, and she read prophets who said the purpose of life is to have fun, and Oprah agreed with them, and Tracey wanted more than what she had, and she didn’t get it, and the prophets said there was no such thing as death, and she apparently threw away everything she had along with the slim chance that everyone is supposed to have in this great nation of ours, the chance to get filthy rich.

We have lately heard that there is a hereafter where all is forgiven, that death is not final after all, that there really is no such thing as death for us, and that our souls are immortal. I happen to know that Tracey Flagler heard that rumor, along with rumors about reincarnation on self-created planets – I read about them in her diaries. I have no doubt whatsoever that it was a factor leading to her premature departure from this planet. A suicide with a reason to kill himself may as a matter of habit feel that he is virtually immortal even though he knows he will actually perish – he believes the future state, even nothingness, is something that will relieve him of his anxiety, hence in that respect nothing really exists for him.

Of course the Judeo-Christian religion scruples against self-killing, citing the sixth commandment against killing while engaging in the wholesale slaughter of foreign enemies who seemingly worship the same god. Remember, “Thou shalt do no murder” is the sixth commandment, properly translated; obedience to God might require one to kill enemies, and killing is not, legally speaking, murder. Mind you that there is no text specifically prohibiting suicide in the Judeo-Christian canon, but the religious still consider it a great evil, not only because life is said to be a gift of God for us to use but which we do not own, but also on the rational grounds that our will to live naturally causes us to fear death, to deem life good and death evil; hence life is the ultimate datum, the greatest good of all goods, wherefore we should revere it and refuse to drink the bitter tea.

According to Plutarch, a rational remedy was employed to cure a terrible affliction suffered by the maidens of Miletos. The ladies were, for some unknown cause, overcome with such a mad desire to die that they hung themselves before they could be prevented from doing so. A wise man moved that a resolution be adopted, that their bodies would be displayed in the shopping center; the malady ended upon the adoption of said resolution.

Besides, suicide costs the society a taxpayer, hence is a sort of theft from the commonweal. We note that, in 1807, twenty-eight Russians buried themselves alive to escape the census, which they believed was sinful.

Let it not be said that one should kill oneself or get oneself killed like the son of God in order to obtain some good, for thou shall not kill, and it is wrong to do an evil to get any good. We project our native instinct to live forever onto a higher personal power, which is a rational power by virtue of being personal, i.e. human: therefore we must find sufficient reasons why God commands us all to live. Suffice it to say that the evil is not in the suicidal act itself but in disobedience to God’s will. Keep in mind that God exists and that suicides will roast in hellfire forever. In fact suicide is high treason, a direct revolt against the almighty will of God. In effect suicide is blasphemous because it seems to detract from the belief that God’s will is in fact all mighty. Further, suicide is a grievous insult to humankind as such.

God does command a few worthy followers to martyr themselves in his name. Jesus was not, then, a suicide but was an obedient son – he would never have committed suicide-by-cop on his own. Yes, indeed, although we are sent here as sentinels, a few of us may be called upon by the Commander to abandon our post. Righteous suicide may be committed for the glory of God, just as humankind wages war against itself in the name of God for the improvement of the race. After all, religion is verily virtual suicide, a denial of that aspect of man’s brutal nature, which includes not only an instinctive urge to fornicate with any woman in sight but also to kill whosoever stands in his way, including his own self. Wherefore self-sacrifice for the love of God and contempt for the perishables of this world including the rotting flesh of the body bag of filth is sometimes warranted for the ascetically inclined.

Suicide is cowardly and ignoble, anti-heroic, a murderous act of sheer desperation. It is better to be killed by an evil-doer or tyrannical authority than to do evil unto oneself by self-murder if one cannot escape from its power. The noble person dies nobly, heroically confronting his undoing, while the ignoble person kills himself to escape what the noble person courageously endures. The suicide does not resist: he is afraid. He despairs and desperately takes his own life. Besides, if there is no afterlife, then this existence, no matter how miserable it might be, is better than nothing. It is better to be miserable than not to be at all.

That might very well be the ignoble and cowardly attitude, one that runs counter to the grain of human nature, which cries out for liberty or death. But most of us are neurotic enough to stick around no matter how miserable we might be, and, notwithstanding the stoical and cynical attitude of pessimistic skeptics, despite our suffering we may expect to be saved from our end right down to the bitter end, which some sweet-lemon prophets advertise as the happiest moment of our lives. The I-god prophets of the Me Era’s popular religious individualism believe individuals live forever at will, intentionally donning and doffing a series of bodies along the way – dying is simply a dramatic scene; death is a farce since there is no such thing.

A discontented person might just move to some other part of the world. But no matter where you go, although that part of the world might look somewhat different, it is the same old world, and there you are, with the same old history, and with the same old stuff to buy thanks to mass production. All of that is quite boring after awhile, and the stuff soon begins to look like so much trash, junk and garbage again.

As for another world, a netherworld or a hereafter which is presumably quite a bit different than this one because it is also inhabited by aliens from other planets who happen to wear medieval costumes as portrayed on Star Trek – why would people want to betake themselves to such a beyond with much of the same old baggage that weighed them down in this one? That would be the continuation of hell on Earth. As for me, I love myself well enough, but I would not take my historical self with me to heaven, I speculated, only to taint paradise and get the vicious cycle going again. History, after all, is to some extent a mistake. It would be best to be born again with the slate wiped clean. But if we arrive with our memories wiped clean, what’s the use of surviving? If I am not to remember my current self on that better planet, if I am to be purified of that naturalized and socialized individual that I think I am now, what do I, as I am, care about that place, other than to be confident that, before I am transported there, my conception of me will be forever laid to rest, even before my body is rendered personally irrelevant and arrives at its final resting place in a grave, or perchance is somehow scattered about – the Hindus and others would leave nary a trace of that sullied cloak behind. May my unsullied soul continue forever without me if it will, and may that continuance be no business of mine for heaven’s sake: Karmic regression or progression is not my concern if I may not remember what transpired before in order to know whether my present state as a werewolf or a demigod is better or worse than my past state.

All the reasons for and against suicide seem to add up to nothing for certain. If one does not embrace life as a premise to be upheld and revered in all circumstances, whether by commandment of a god or not, then a number of options present themselves. Given the warring history of the human race, the consensus seems to be that the quality of life is more important than life itself.

Tracey Flagler tried very hard to appreciate the quality of her life, which was no doubt better than that of untold millions of inhabitants of this planet, and the fact that she tried so hard makes it evident that it was not for her in the first place. She was young and attractive and passionate, a fun-loving girlfriend to her boyfriends; she was always able to find good jobs serving delicious food; she picked up hundreds of dollars in tips almost whenever she wanted to; she had a modest studio two blocks from a beautiful beach. But none of that was enough. She suffered terribly for the dearth of some ineluctable thing that she thought was the purpose and point of life, namely fun or joy. She never had enough fun, and thought the lack was due to a shortage of stuff. The pop prophets reinforced her faith in fun and in the notion that it can be purchased. Her notebooks reiterate endlessly the impoverished terminology of the instant success cult: I, want, fun, joy, me, feel, source, Oprah, money, stuff, famous, Madonna, eternal, rich, universe, attraction, vibrations…. And then there are the almost pathological perseverations, the fearful chanting of positive affirmations – unfortunately, we cannot make ourselves appreciate something simply by affirming the appreciation that we don’t really have over and over again.

The handwritten menus, the lists of ingredients in various dishes, that I found in Tracey’s notebooks are far more mouthwatering, and led me to believe that her life would have been richer if she had focused her intensely passionate nature on the objective details of things, on the consideration of other people, on the study of some liberal art she might have some interest in – a course in academic philosophy might disenchant her of the popular delusions.

At the bottom of Tracey’s being there was an awful want, a terrible desire, a craving so intense that only a Buddha or a withdrawing drug addict could fathom it. Of course the inchoate desire she suffered was not unique. We have it in common, but we manage to cover it up, put it on a leash, subdue it, repress it, ignore it, or just accept it and suffer it. Some suffer it more than others, and poor Tracey simply could not tolerate the suffering. She wanted to believe the hype that the purpose of life is a constant joy that can be had in hand, instead of admitting the truth, that human nature is suffering, and that without it even fleeting joy would be impossible. She had her doubts about the eternal joy business: she expressed her anger at the false prophets from time to time: “I HATE you, I HATE all of you!”

That is not to say that overt suffering is a good thing or that we should suffer needlessly. Freud was right: Neurotic people cling to their misery in self-defense no matter what paradise is promised. Sometimes we suffer only because we want to, although we don’t know it. I developed a habit of asking myself, when miserable, “Do I want to make myself miserable?” No? Then I dwell on something else, and that’s the end of that. Thoughts do influence matter, that much is self-evident, but the magic of positive thinking needs the right means.

Tracey thought a million dollars would afford her more leisure to have the kind of fun she wanted to have. Most of us without a million bucks would not mind having a million or more. If only everyone could get their hands on a million dollars, our world would presumably be a much better place to live in provided inflation could be held to less than two percent per annum. Yes, a million dollars would make room for more fun, but fun at doing what? If I had a million dollars I might quit my day job tomorrow and invest my time in saving the world with success books. Ideally they would be written, edited and published by yours truly, under my Three Stooges Publishing imprimatur. I already have the first book in mind, How to Make a Million Dollars for Somebody Else. I shall submit it for approval by Oprah Winfrey’s book club. I can see myself now, chatting with Oprah on her show, explaining how the world would be a much better place if everyone would try to make a million dollars for someone else rather than for themselves, and I shall suggest that she use some of her $2.5 billion to sponsor a brand new reality show called The Pot Latchers. I shall bring along Tracey’s One Million Dollar Bill coffee mug and some her catnip tea for people who like to see magic stuff, and I shall bring along Penelope, her teddy bear, too. Ten percent of the profits would go into the Tracey Flagler Foundation for Stray Cats.

Oh, Dear Tracey, I did not know you when you were here, but I know you well enough now, and I miss you. You were welcome here. You thought you were a weirdo; you thought that you did not fit in here because your craving was not satisfied, you felt nobody could make you whole or fill your hole. If only you had known that South Beach is for weirdoes, and that you would have fit right in here, we could have had fun suffering life together. We could have had fun riding in limos. We would have gotten on the Oprah show. We would have opened up an erotica boutique, a tattoo parlor, and a night club on Washington Avenue. Yes, we would have suffered, but we would have had a great deal of fun even thought that is not the purpose of life.

This is the season to be jolly, but I am sad at present, and I look forward to saying good riddance to this two thousand and seventh year of the Common Era, or, if you prefer, the same year of the Lord Jesus Christ. Of course this year had its good side: there is no evil unattended by some good, and vice versa. The Dualists say Good shall overcome Evil in the end, and then and only then shall there be one god, an entirely good god at that, but until then we shall have them both. I am thankful for a goodly number of reasons, which I am in no mood to presently enumerate, and may the New Year be a happier one for us all. But for now I am sorrowful.

I have just received word that Nathan, scheduled to be home for Christmas, was killed in Iraq. His grieving grandfather, a minister and a missionary, had tried to persuade him not to go to war; but he was an idealistic youth: he wanted to exercise the patriotic ideal handed down to him from high authority; he wanted to “do the right thing” urged by the president of the United States in the name of the unseen father higher than his father, whosoever that unknown all-mighty might be. Of course we support our troops, but I for one envision the devil dangling by the neck at the end of a flag from a pole while his councilors face a firing squad below.

The year did not begin well for my family: my niece’s dad went into the backyard and shot himself to death with a rifle shortly before she turned sweet sixteen, apparently over economic woes. They were close; we could only imagine the sorrow and horror she felt – she did not show it. My aging father, always solicitous for her welfare, was left extraordinarily distraught. He had already suffered from an Orpheus Complex for nearly seventy years: my mother died of polio, shortly after I was born, in her twenty-first year, and since then he often wept over several poems he had composed in commemoration and then frequently rewrote throughout his life, changing a word here and there, but never getting them quite right. He finally joined her shortly after his ninetieth birthday – how such a wide difference in age is resolved in the hereafter no one knows, for sure, except perhaps the psychic who swears that all persons there are thirty years old regardless of their age at time of death.

And then my friend Doc gave me his old, slider cell phone for good luck. I received a call on it a few weeks later, from his new number, but it was not him: it was his son, who informed me that Doc had died. If there is a life similar to this one after death, with money and all that it implies, I shall buy him that cheeseburger, as I had promised to do in order to break his insistence on paying for our greasy meals when we got together. And now the nation’s elders have sacrificed young Nathan’s life, needlessly, in my opinion, if it were not for the need of the young to imitate their elders and prove their mettle. Doc understood all that: he proved himself several times over in Vietnam, and elsewhere on Black Ops; he was a warrior by profession, loyal to his nation and its commander-in-chief, no matter who he might be.

“Woe is me,” is certainly unsuitable in my case. It is not as if my entire family and many friends besides were killed collateral to the struggle for so-called liberty. Again, I have due cause to be thankful for many things, not to mention just being alive in the first place and the chance to rejoice once in awhile as my own end appears over the horizon.

Still I have been morbid as of late, and even the more so since I found the beautiful body of Stacey Flagler, the girl next door, decomposing in her apartment. Her diaries revealed that all she wanted out of life was fun and joy and love, which amounted to the same thing.

“Joy,” she wrote, “is the whole point of life.”

The hodgepodge pop-culture endorsed by her frantic idol Oprah Winfrey had convinced her that the purpose of life is personal joy, that death is really a myth, that good and evil are relative, that even Hitler went to heaven because he thought he was doing the right thing, that there is really no such thing as death, that we are all immortals who choose and discard one body or another and take up yet another at will, so she discarded hers, and I found it rotting in her studio.

Unsurprisingly, she had taken up democratic channeling – everyone can now sit down and hold séances with their ids, alter egos, superegos, and other psychic entities if need be, and become mediums for ghosts, spirits, souls, and gods and the like. I supposed that was all a lot of nonsense; but then again, wishful thinking along with the fact that our culture, hoping for a better life, worships death somewhat more than life, has given me cause to dabble in the occult, and, in this living novel, to dwell at length on the incidentals of the demise of one Stacey Flagler, may she rest in peace if she’s not dancing for joy in paradise.

The pop-culture of today is constituted by warmed-up leftovers of the postmodern dishes we relished in the Sixties. We said yes to the occult long before we just said no to hallucinogenic substances that helped us to get together, get with it, freak out and enjoy the vibes. Our vibes back then are today’s vibrations.

And now the mesmerizing high priestess of the Virtual Church of O has endorsed something called the Law of Attraction. Someone used to refer to the Power of Magnetic Thinking. We don’t need to hold on to an iron rod dipped in water to cure our woes nowadays. We can plug ourselves in to the will-power-source within, direct the current to our internal generators; the amplified flow, oscillating according to our fondest dreams, may create magnetic fields capable of attracting whatever we might want, or at least set up an aura of the right wavelengths to attract money and mates like bugs, if not send some sort of electromagnetic ray to reel in the prey from afar, or perhaps radio-waves emitted by our Diamond Crystal Radio implants might enable us to use the fabled Power of Suggestion on people at a great distance.

But it is difficult to keep up with the amazing progress of science, so analogies drawn from that field to create useful science fiction aids to successful thinking might be exposed as faulty, which would cause people to look like fools and to lose faith, It’s best to keep the scheme and the technical methodology in which one has faith secret, lest the critics, who would naturally resent one’s luxurious lifestyle were it obtained, do everything they can to retard the novitiate’s progress. We used to speak of a person’s magnetic power quite often until someone familiar with magnets pointed out that like does not attract like, as the ancients thought; in fact, as many married couples know very well, opposites attract, wherefore it would seem that praying for wealth might attract poverty.

Maybe it would be best to take vows of poverty in order to be loved by the universe and to therefore gain catholic fame and fortune. We may recall that the wise old Jew in Balzac’s Skin of Chagrin renounced things and pursued philosophy: things flew to him as if he were a magnet; he got what he did not want, namely everything, including an antique store wherein the wild ass’s skin was deposited until the suicidal fool who had given up philosophy took it as a gift.

For all we know, the holes vacated by electrons in the Jewel in the Lotus race around in a direction contrary to that of the electrons, as the electrons vacate and fill hole after hole. And who says that space itself is negative, when we may think of it as positive; the things that fill it negate it, hence are negative. Let it be positively negative if you prefer. The negative has its positive attractions after all, especially in a liberal consumer democracy, where the motto might well be “Find a hole and fill it ad infinitum.” The miserable shall be comforted and the meek shall inherit the earth. We are all bums at the bottom of our being: we should have more faith in Nothing.

My positive might be your negative and vice versa. Debit and credit do not mean minus and plus, but mean right and left; and then there’s the question, to whose right and left? But never mind scientific skepticism; positivism gets sensational results, so let’s be positive and embrace positivism. It is generally accepted that we must be positive to obtain a fortune including an attractive, sexy mate. That’s the ticket to winning friends and influencing people profitably. Think negatively and suffer the consequences accordingly: live in poverty alone or with a broken-down old nag or an abusive, beer-guzzling football fan. I am feeling more positive now that I think of it. Let people be miserable if they want to be, and then maybe someone will come to comfort them, but don’t depend on it in our grasping society, where so many people have only Jesus for a friend.

Yes, I am getting into a better mood at this place in our living novel. I feel like crawling completely out of the disheartening dumps I’ve been in. I’ve turned off the television and have picked up Stacey Flagler’s notebooks. Although she finally negated herself, there is something very positive about the way she felt. If she had kept the faith for another year or so, I believe she might have lived her dream, perhaps even be blessed and graced by the likes of Oprah Winfrey.

“I have faith in the Law of Attraction,” Tracey had written large on a page in a brown spiral notebook, “and I make myself the focus of my energy field. I have a sense of connection to it no matter what or where I am. I need to be a vibrational match to be wealthy and to attract a true mate. I would experience the joy I am seeking if I were involved with someone who is somewhere within my vibrational range. I need to feel good, and know that there is enough security, connection, and stability.

“Getting stuff and mates is not about getting what you deserve. Fame and success is not about talent –it is about the alignment of vibrations. Nothing is about getting anything – it is all about vibration. I shall be a vibrational match to whatever I want, and attract it right to me. I shall pretend that my vibrations attract a wealthy mate and that he matches my vibrations and buys me an amazing home. I shall focus connecting energetically to what I want and receiving it. The more people caught in my web the better, as long as I put myself first.

“Abraham says just get happy and all things will flow into my experience. The universe loves me; the only thing I have to do for the universe is be as happy as I can be: that is the trade and the exchange, I feel swept away into a current because it feels good to connect to the energy stream. It is fun to be in the freaking energy stream! I want the energy connection. Oh, magic is afoot! I feel such excitement about the thoughts I’m thinking! It’s all about my imagination as reality. Imagination is the great launching pad!

“I feel money flowing now. I feel myself being in the top 5% financially. What is it that I love so much about money? I love it for the flow of energy and stuff that it makes possible, for being able to buy things that help to make it the energy flow, to put out great vibrations that attract people who love me. Some man is going to get a great girlfriend who loves sex, who knows how to have fun and focus on the best, on the most excellent things, on sensual and spiritual things.

“I love the name of the book I am writing about this stuff, Intentional Genius. What a marvelous title! I feel my energy flowing in that project. I feel I am on the brink of success! My vibrations will attract wealthy geniuses from all over the universe. And I love doing channeling too, relaxing and lowering my vibrations so my mind can be the medium for Abraham, Immanuel, Seth and the others. I do love my own energy so much, the energy flowing from myself, in pulses that say ‘love, love, love, love.’

There you go. I am feeling cheerful now, so I shall give Stacey’s memory the benefit of the doubt. She might be immortal after all. Happy Holiday, Stacey, wherever you are! We love you! We love you! We love you!